Collaborative software development for nanoscale physics

Speaker(s) : Yann Pouillon

Language : English

Nature : Conference

Date : Thursday 12 July 2012

Schedule : 14h40

Duration : 40 minutes

Place : Uni Mail R150

Abstract

Nanoscale physics is playing a steadily increasing part in the current technological evolution, bringing many challenges along with promising new properties. At the nanometer scale, it is indeed necessary to take quantum-mechanical effects into account, which makes the overall picture much more complexe than that provided by classical physics. In this area, the frontiers between various disciplines tend to blur significantly and collaboration takes precedence over competition.

This talk describes the collaborative efforts carried out in the framework of the European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility (ETSF), a synchrotron-like e-infrastructure relying on a network of 200 scientists
spread all over Europe. These efforts comprise the coordinated collaborative development of dedicated software, the supply of standardized and documented libraries, the setting and maintenance of a code repository as well as a test farm, the packaging of codes and libraries for major Linux distributions, and the technical training of researchers through the organization of developer schools.

Biographie

Researcher-Engineer at the University of the Basque Country, in San-Sebastián, Spain, Yann Pouillon is also coordinator of the software activities of the European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility (ETSF, http://etsf.eu/). User and administrator of Linux-based platforms since 1996, he has been developer and maintainer of the Abinit software (http://abinit.org/) since 2004, and maintains the nanoscale-physics and nanoscale-physics-dev metapackages of Debian Science since 2010.